The dining hall around us was dark as Nan finished his discussion that night. At our

a The dining hall around us was dark as Nan finished his discussion that night. At our table we sat in a pool of dim light and waited on the Master as he considered his next thoughts. I knew that some of what drew China’s great minds here to dinners with him was a sense that those old ideas of Chinese philosophy - born in an age of chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress - offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself? “You know you can’t just understand this easily,” Master Nan said sharply. He was a little angry with me, I could see, for asking such a direct question - and he was also using the Chinese teaching technique of taking students through a range of emotions to accelerate their learning. Chinese philosophers believe we learn differently depending on how we feel, so a teacher making a student scared or insulted or proud is often just an educational tactic. Nan was working on my humiliation bone now: “This isn’t like some idea I can sell you and then you can just go and use,” he continued, his voice rising. “This is going to be hard.” Master Nan inhaled on his cigarette and waited a moment. “If you work, though, maybe you can be like Su Qin,” he said, “the man who wrestled 20 years of peace out of 300 years of war.” Su Qin was the hero of the Warring States period during which China collapsed into total chaos. He is remembered today, two thousand years later, for the way he had penetrated the madness of his age and how he found there deeper fibers of truth that he lashed into a stable peace. “Su Qin started as an idealist. He failed. “You know, Su Qin was humiliated in trying to advise kings. Even his kin were embarrassed. His sister and mother refused to let him return to the family home. He was in so much pain over this embarrassment that he sat in front of a desk and read every book of history he could find for seven years. He tied his long hair to a beam above his desk so that if he fell asleep it would hold his head up. Sometimes he would stab a knife into his thigh to keep awake.” Nan’s voice was rising, his speech picking up pace. “But in the end, he learned. Su Qin learned. You should study him. If you do this, if you are sincere, if you work hard, if you learn these ideas, you can understand. Can you be that disciplined?” The room was dead quiet now. No one looked at me. In the silence, one of the guests passed around a plate of cut fresh fruit and cherries and sweet dried dates. Nan’s relentless, intense Ch’an Buddhism sort of enlightenment, delivered only after painful years of carbon-crushing intellectual intensity, expressed a clear ambition: To learn to feel through invisible relations and balances and to construct something promising and hopeful on the other side. Nan’s long sessions of mediation or sword play, his furious pursuing philosophical dialogues that reduced students to an embarrassed sweating state, these were all aimed at sharpening a blade so as to instantly carve at the energy flows of our age. Did “spiritual illness” really linger ahead of us? What sort of tragedy did that suggest? What was it that, hair tied to the 11 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018243